Guatemala, oh how I've missed you.

So I'm happily back in Guatemala, which feels like a homecoming after Mexico. I thought I would be sad to leave the 2nd world comforts of Mexico behind, but I'm so used to the Guatemalan way of life that it seems more normal to me now. I actually missed the Guatemalan breakfast/dinner of eggs, blackbeans, and plantains. Now that I've had it a few times since I've been back I'm officially sick of it again. But it's comforting to know that I'll eat it about 100 more times in the next few weeks.

I spent a few days in Flores, which is a tiny island in a big lake in the Petan, aka the hot jungle part in the northern (top hat) section of Guatemala. I liked Flores a lot. It seems like a city, but it's all confined to this island, so everything is three blocks from everything else. It's beautiful. I watched a lot of sunseets over the lake and sat on a lot of docks. Erik and I ran into another friend of ours from the Language school and we ended up all hanging out together for the rest of the time in Flores. We found a cheap hostel with lots of young people and good food. Mornings and evenings were really pleasant, and the middle of the day is too hot to think or move. I took a lot of cold showers.

Yesterday was another really long day. We got up at 4am to catch the earliest bus to Tikal. Got there right after the park opened at 6ish. We wanted to go early so we could see everything before it got too hot to move. It was a good plan. It was actually cool enough to walk around and see all the huge temples. We climbed a few, got some bangin' pictures of the temples sticking up through the tops of the trees. So I've gotten my fill of Mayan ruins in the last week. I need a little break from all the archeology. If I see anymore I'll turn into my parents.

So after Tikal we caught a bus at 2pm for Coban, which is luckily not in the jungle. It's so great to be back in a place where I need a blanket at night. Coban feels a lot like Xela, which makes me like it a lot. I'm pretty much just glad that I can wear long pants and a tshirt and feel comfortable all day long. I just wasn't made for that tropics business. Tomorrow we're going to Semuc Champey, then my travel buddy has to go to Belize to fly home, so I'm on my own for a little while. I may meet up with some other folks from the language school, or I might head for El Salvador and eat my weight in Pupusas. If everything goes as planned, I'll be flying back to DC sometime around the 15th of May.

I live in a tree, but I'm not Swiss

San Cristobal was a blur. It seemed to be so brightly colored after the greyscale of Xela. I didn't get to do nearly everything I wanted to do there eventhough I stayed an extra day. I went to a coffee museum, and two seperate churches on hilltops. I got sick again, but not so bad. I feel much better now. I spent a lot of time on the roof of our hostel watching the sun set in the hills. I bought a bunch of stuff from a Zapatista collective. Good times.

On Saturday we took a bus from San Cristobal to Palenque, which is a lot lower in elevation, and in the actual scary jungle. It's hot in the jungle. When I say jungle, I mean like where Curious George is from. I might as well wear a big yellow hat. So we show up at this place a friend recomended expecting a really cheap hostel, and we find a giant resort type situation in the jungle with everything from fancy cabanas to just a place to hang your hammock. So now I live in a tree house, Swiss Family Robinson style, for which I pay a little less than $4 a night. This tree house is exactly what I would have wanted to live in as a child. It's tiny, and you have to climb up the ladder of a playground slide and walk across a plank to get to the door. Kind of a trick with a backpack on. Luckily you can slide from my door to the bathroom. Anyway, this place has a pool (so great in the middle of the day) , and a restaurant where I spend all my money.

So this morning I went and saw my first major batch of Mayan ruins for this trip. The ruins here at Palenque are beautiful. I climed about a million tiny stairs and took as many pictures. I'm so fascinated with the jungle. It's so different from anything I'm used to that I feel like it only belongs in movies. It's like being on mars or something. Once it got too hot to hang out at the ruins anymore we went back to the treehouse and spent the afternoon at the pool. A pretty bueno day if I do say so myself. The rest of this trip is looking up.

Tomorrow I'm heading back to Guatemala for more ruins among other things. I've been spoiled by spending so much time in the mountains, now that it's hot again I don't know what I'll do with myself. I better buy more tank tops and shower a little more frequently. We'll see what happens.

oh, and there's a few more pictures now on the same link I put up below including one of the tree house, and some of the ruins. Note the delicious looking cow head we found in the market in San Cristobal.

My bus adventure in Mexico

Holla' from Mexico. I arrived in San Cristobal yesterday morning at 3am after the longest bus trip ever. Let me recount the last few days of my life for you...

Sunday Evening, Easter: It's our last night in Xela, so my friends and I decide to throw a little fiesta in the hostel where most of us are staying. It's a pancake party where with lost of different toppings. We made so many pancakes, and ate really a lot of sugar. Stayed up late, said goodbye to Xela, got to bed around 2am, the latest I've stayed up since I left Washington DC.

Monday: Got up at 6am, shockingly still tired for some reason. Ate the remaining pancakes on the way to the bus station. Missed meeting the rest of out group at the bus station and because of this got on a different bus than everyone else at 7am. We asked for a bus to Mexico, we should have been more specific. So we're on a chicken bus, the actual slowest chicken bus ever, to a border town way south of where we really want to go. 5-6 hours, three rickshaws, and one taxi ride later we arrive in the bus terminal of Tapachula, Mexico. Luckily we got through the border without any problems and got plenty of time on our visas for mexico. So now it's 1:30pm and we wait in Tapachula for the next bus to San Cristobal which leaves at 5:30. Not too bad. People keep telling us that it's a 5 hour ride, so we figure we'll get there in time to get a room for the night. When we get on the bus I'm shocked and excited to find out that it's not the recycled US school buses that I'm used to but a first class pulsh fancy shiny giant of a bus. So nice. This feels like the ritz after Guatemala. About three hours into the ride we stop and I start to get off thinking that we're in San Cristobal.. nope. Apparently when people told us that it was a 5 hour ride to San Cristobal it was some kind of cruel joke. It took 10 hours and two horribe movies to reach our final destination. I slept most of the way which was nice, but I could have done without arriving at three in the morning. We figured it was too late to get a room, and we didn't want to we walking around with all of our stuff at three in he morning so we decided to stay in the bus station until the sun came up. We slept (or tried to) in the wooden seats and listened to the blairing Chiapas tourism video about 500 times. After a few hours I figured out that I was sitting in gum. It's cold in San Cristobal at 3 in the morning. It was a bit of a long bus adventure, but I suppose it'll make a good story. I think it makes me sound tough.

Tuesday: We finally met up with our friends, who had arrived at 4 in the afternoon the day before, and got all checked into a hostel. Had a pretty rocking day exploring San Cristobal and trying not to fall asleep. We ran into some folks we knew from Xela and had a really good veggie dinner with them. Small World I suppose.

San Cristobal is cool, a lot more colorful than Xela, but it's also got a lot more gringos. People keep trying to sell me Zapatista dolls in the street, and we found a store where you can buy the masks for like $2.50. There's a cool Mayan medicine museum that we're going to check out today.

Pictures of Beautiful Beautiful Guatemala

ok, so my first attempt at pictures seems to have been foiled. I'll try again soon. Right now I'm in Tapachula, Mexico hanging out waiting for my next bus. I crossed the border from Guatemala a few hours ago, and I'll be in Mexico for a week or two. Mexico feels really really hot after being in Xela for three weeks. I'm excited to take the first class bus here instead of a chicken bus, and to stay in a hostel and cook for myself. Rice and veggies here I come!

Since my pictures aren't working yet, here's a link for my friend's pictures. We've been traveling together since the mountain school, so it's pretty much the same thing. I think I'm even in a few. Check out the Lago Atitlan pictures, that was my trip to San Pedro.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/90511003@N00

Semana Santa - The People Love a Parade

Semana Santa is so weird, I love it. So this week, the week before Easter, all of Latin America just goes crazy. Everything (really, everything) closes down and they throw like a million processions. Where I am, in Xela every church has their own procession which generally consists of a bunch of men and women in purple, a marching band, some kids dressed up as Jesus and Mary, and a bunch of huge floats depicting Jesus in different stages of Crucifixion. Xela is about the size of Boulder (not that big, smaller than Denver for sure) and there were like 20 different processions yesterday. This has been going on all week. These people love a parade. I kinda love it too actually. It's been really interesting to watch Xela transform into a big fiesta town. Usually the streets are empty by 8, but last night in the park it was shoulder to shoulder. A lot of the women in Xela dress in Mayan ropa tipica, so it's really interesting to see this mix of traditional Mayan culture and Catholic tradition coming together under floats and set to marching band music. The floats are really cool too. It's like a competition between different churches because all the floats show pretty much the same thing, so they all try to trick them out the most. A lot of them will have neon light halos on Mary and Jesus which is funny and reminds me of Vegas, and one Jesus was even dripping blood like a fountain. wow.

Erica y el Volcan Tajumulco

I climbed a big old mountain this weekend. Now I'm tired. It was an interesting experiance because I've had a real lack of excercise in my life for the last few months (or years..whatever). I felt like such a Colorado outdoors person. I was expecting to be like a superhero because I'm used to the high elevation, but Tajumulco is twice the elevation of Denver. I felt it a little. At "base camp," where we slept you could look down at clouds in the valley. It was cold, but lots of fun. We left Xela at 5 in the morning on saturday, hiked our little buns off until 1:30, went to bed at like 8, and got up at 4am sunday morning to climb (in the dark) to the peak for sunrise. The peak is the highest point in Central America, so you're supposed to be able to see all sorts of stuff, but it was really cloudy so we just saw clouds. It still good times. I'll be talking about how I climbed the highest mountain in Central America every chance I get. I climbed the highest mountain in Central America.

My busy social life in Xela continues. It's loco, I'm busier here than I ever was in Denver. Crazy world.

I'm going camping. Guatemala is just like Colorado.

What up. I'm so busy here it's crazy. Now that I'm not sick and i can actually leave the house, social life in Guatemala has exploded. I would think that I would have lots of time to read and hang out in the casa, but no - I'm always doing something with the school, or being tourist, or hangin' out with my new amigos causing trouble. I decided that if we form a gang we should be the jets because we're all gringos. Everyone else in Xela will be the sharks.. But I don't want to form a gang.

I've discovered a great coffee shop close to the school. I'm meeting a friend of a friend there in an hour. When I decided to come to Xela I discovered that my friend Amanda (the one who gets down low and into it) has another friend studying the espanol here as well. Now I'm going to buy her coffee and ask if I can borrow her warm clothes for the camping trip this weekend..

Which brings me to the camping trip this weekend. This weekend I'm climbing Tajumulco, the highest peak in Central America. So that should be fun. It's apparently kinda cold at the top. But you can see Mexico and the ocean. Xela is nowhere near an ocean.. not even close. It's like colorado.

I have one more week of school left, Semana Santa, (aka the biggest/most religious party in latin america) and then it appears that I'm going to travel around bit with people I've met here. Who knows what'll happen after that.

Lago Atitlan - Not Too Shabby

I'm feeling better, much much better now. I spent the weekend in San Pedro on Lago Atitlan. Beautiful. Lago Atitlan is a massive volcanic lake that's a little like Lake Como only with four volcanoes on the edge. I took in the sights, ate really great food, and rode on a boat twice. I kept thinking that if there's a krakken in Guatemala, it would be in Lago Atitlan. I might buy a finca and start a Lago Atitlan Architeuthis research center. Or I could just come back to the US... who knows. It was a good weekend though. I'm back in Xela now and I just filled up on really good pizza. The pizza hit the spot after the 4 hour chicken bus ride it took to get back here. I'm chicken bussed out for a little while. It's an experiance for sure, but I'm too big to share a school bus seat with two other people. Next time I have a long ride it's first class all the way.

I'm ready for my next week of spanish classes. I'm going to have a lot of conversations, and practice my self silly. I will be the spanish master.

I'd like to start a poll about what I should do when I finish spanish school in two weeks.. there are a few options:
-keep going to spanish school in Xela or somewhere else, get really good
-travel around Central America solo/with people I meet at school until the end of May when I'm planning on meeting other people in Mexico
-Come back to the US for a while (this could mean DC or Denver) and apply to schools/generally figure out my life before the next leg of my travels.
-mystery option 4? Suggestions?

so for those of you who don't know what you're going to do with your life, don't worry. I don't know what I'm going to do with my month.